Two Cities

I.

I used to like Murakami. Especially After Dark and the quality of silence only a well-written book can ever achieve.

Ever since I've read Sleep, my take on Murakami's stories changed from reverence to indifference. The economy of words used to strike me as noteworthy, but I reached the point where I could no longer bear his writing style. It's flat and mundane. It's anticlimactic. It banks only on cinematic moments that can be insightful, but sappy at the same time. It's lonely--and now that I'm thinking hard about it, his writing isn't the good kind of loneliness. It's unproductive. It's bored.

I mean, I have nothing against cats--but can he be self-aware?

II.

Two months ago I've finished reading One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez. Most of it were interstitial reading: at the bus, at the sala of our aparment--or whenever there's spare time. I instantly warmed to his writing: dream-like, surreal, and yet still historical, ground to his context. The characters live in a world that's unbelievably absurd it must have been written by someone who lived life without any pretention or verbal masturbation.

Finally: a normal writer, a writer who falsifies, who sins, who takes advantage of fiction's capacity to make worlds, and who believes that fiction can mimic life's quality as something that thrives in noise and silence, and that can only be told as an absurd truth.